Today we’re going to talk about some basketball drills you can have your players to do work on motion offense.

I think the biggest hurdle when you get to coaching motion is teaching your players to read the defense, and letting them loose–and another big hurdle is getting comfortable teaching reads and habits instead of patterns.

3-Around-2 Motion Offense

3-Around-2 Motion Offense

A lot of the same principles you see in any motion starts with some screening pairs with our bigs screening to get something. Now we could get something out of that; we could get a curl, we could get something scoring right away. We want to read that.

The first thing we’re doing is just get some block to block, screening with our bigs and getting to a high low. Also, we want to focus on keeping good spacing on the side of the floor with our two perimeter guys. We’re getting out of the way and keeping the defense occupied and looking at some high low situations.

We hit the high post first, and we’re certainly looking at that duck in. We get screen aways, and we get some different high low situations. Sometimes we can swing it and just go ahead and ball screen out of that situation.

So explain this to your players and then just run through the offensive basketball drill, letting your guys get a feel for it.

The key point to have your perimeter guys focus on is using the 3-point line as a balance point. We want those two guys catching outside of the 3-point line as much as possible. One of the first things we want to work on with our perimeter guys is just catching and facing the right way.

One of the things you will probably see happen is you get your two big guys, and sometimes we don’t always have a big guy that can make this shot.

You can talk about high low all you want, but if this guy’s not going to get any respect and be defended, it’s kind of hard to throw it high low. So what we want the big guys to work on if they’re less of a threat, is a quick reversal and ball screen because now their man is going to have to come out of the hole to play a guy off of that.

Catching and Facing Drill

Catching and Facing Drill

Get your players in a line, and tell the first player to hit you (the coach) up top, get open, and catch and face. Right-handed players should establish their left foot as their pivot foot; left-handed players should use their right foot as their pivot foot.

Emphasize that all you really want your players to do during this drill is to catch and face–to make like they’re looking at the post.

After they’ve all been able to work on catching and facing, instruction them to catch and face, shot fake, and do one dribble outside the 3-point line.

We could do this at one end of the floor with our perimeter guys, just working on footwork–especially with your young players.

During this drill, you really want to focus on footwork. There’s no question that the game of basketball is like learning a dance. The offensive end of the floor, it’s a dance–you have to learn how to pivot, how to catch and face, how to be balanced. On the defensive end of the floor, you have to learn how to get down in a stance and slide.

It’s important with your break down drills to really work on footwork and get your players accustomed to that dance.

These are just two basketball drills you can work on to get your players accustomed to the footwork and movement necessary for offensive motion. Are you looking forward to trying these drills out with your team?